Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Stealth games, if you ask me, are a bit stupid. In fact, the term stupid doesn’t do justice to their inherent preposterousness and borderline obtuse behaviour, as your character crouches down like a bear in the woods, doing the side-crab shuffle for mile after virtual mile, because apparently – despite being some muscle clad badass weighed-down by weaponry – crouching makes you harder to see? Have you ever tried crouch-walking around in your day-to-day? If not, let me assure you, it does not make you harder to see. Everyone will spot you and they will mock you.

Then there’s the incoherent rules, with enemies spotting players lurking behind walls because, well, reasons. Maybe your vision didn’t have the right kind of vignette? And don’t get me started on goldfish brained henchmen on patrol who are not concerned that the three people they have been speaking to on a loop for the last twenty minutes have inexplicably disappeared. Thankfully, Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice, is a stealth game that bucks the trend. Smart, challenging, and immaculately crafted, this is the kind of stealth based action I’ll crab-walk in the shadows for.

Played from a top-down isometric perspective, Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice gives you control of a merry-band of iconic feudal-Japan archetypes. There’s a Ninja who can throw shuriken and clamber across rooftops, a heavily armoured Samurai who can go toe-to-toe with any foe, a kunoichi who can don disguises and murder death kill with only a hairpin, you get the idea.

Your team are tasked with protecting the Shogun, which usually means carefully and strategically stealth killing your way across immense and intricate levels. You are, for the most part, left to carve you own path across the environment, completing a few objectives on the way.

Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice is a standalone expansion to 2016’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Released way back in 2021 on PC, this substantial expansion has now made its way to console around a year